Hugo Reyne & La Simphonie du Marais - Bach: Concertos brandebourgeois (2016)

La Simphonie du Marais is offering you a masterpiece of the Baroque repertoire, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Hugo Reyne, now as the conductor, now as the recorder player, reveals the extent of Leipzig’s future cantor’s talent in a version «à la française» that allows ample room for the wind instruments.

Until he was almost thirty, the young Bach had devoted himself almost exclusively to composing keyboard music, organ or harpsichord. Very little vocal music, or chamber music, still less for the orchestra. And then one of his life’s most determining events occurred, his discovery around 1713-1714 of Italian music, especially the concertos for various ensembles. First in the form of handwritten copies : printing was expensive, so at the time it was these copies which largely contributed to the circulation of the new works, and often enough they remained the sole knowledge sources for those past works. The creations of Corelli, Albinoni, or Torelli were circulating in Germany ; and the famous virtuoso violinist Pisendel, former student of Torelli, and to whom Vivaldi dedicated six concertos, was also bound to pass the scores on to his friend Bach. However, it is the printed publishing that would prove decisive, especially with the publication in Amsterdam of Vivaldi’s first collection, already very well-known in Germany, and which would excite musical Europe.

Then organist and concert master at Weimar Principality, Bach was seized by a passion for these concertos. In order to better absorb their formal and stylistic novelty, he first made a point of undertaking their transcriptions, reducing and adapting them for the harpsichord or the organ, and therefore understanding from within the patterns of their language. Today there are thus more than twenty concertos recognized as transcriptions by Bach for his own use. …

La Simphonie du Marais
Hugo Reyne, flute, conductor